Ford used slave labour during WWII, book reveals

Ford Motor Company knowingly allowed slave labour at its German subsidiary during World War II and backed its European divisions making equipment for the Nazi military, according to a controversial new book.

Although it has long been known that Henry Ford, the company's founder, held anti-semitic views, the extent of his involvement in Hitler's rise to power is in dispute.

Max Wallace, a journalist and Holocaust researcher, wrote in The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich that both men fell for Nazi propaganda.

Referring to newly declassified government documents, Mr Wallace alleged that Nazi links at the Detroit company went well beyond Henry Ford. The documents indicate that his son Edsel, the then company president, could have been prosecuted for trading with the enemy had he not died in 1943, probably the most damaging revelation in the book.

The evidence the US Justice Department gathered included 11 letters between Mr Edsel and the head of Ford's French division in 1942 which suggest the parent company knew and approved of the manufacturing efforts being undertaken on behalf of the German military.

The Justice Department concluded there was "a basis for a case" against the then president.

Before America entered the war, Ford made profits from supplying Germany with military equipment, while declining to make engines for the RAF, calling into question Ford's claims to have been "strictly neutral", Mr Wallace said. Ford argues that it had no control over the use of slave labour at its German plant, as it lost control of the company after 1941.

But according to documents cited by the book, the first forced labourers arrived at the factory before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the US into the conflict.

Intelligence documents also suggest that Henry Ford's secretary, Ernest Liebold, was a Nazi spy who helped develop his boss's paranoia about Jews. Henry Ford is mentioned in Mein Kampf, and was heralded by Hitler as "my inspiration".